The "Moving Target Defense" (MTD) system, as envisioned by Kansas State University's Scott DeLoach and Xinming Ou, has a computer network automatically change its configurations and settings to deter hackers. It sounds like a great idea, and good for security, until you think about the types of computer networks that will end up using it:

Our robot overlords.

 Seriously, haven't we done enough already to make things easy for the machines that will one day rise up to enslave us? This is like those movies where the hero is all, "WHY DIDN'T YOU BUILD AN OFF SWITCH FOR YOUR DOOMSDAY DEVICE?!"

It's all fun and games, and safely in the realm of the theoretical, until someone actually designs a working model. The problem is that KSU got a million-dollar grant to spend the next five years figuring out how to make it work. I'm sure this will end well.

Some Jobs More than Others

Let's face facts: Robots are the future. For real this time. Beyond automated assembly lines, we are going to see robots in more and more human-facing roles (and people are looking especially closely at Japan on this one, since they have an older population that vastly outnumbers the working-age population, and someonething is going to have to care for them.)

So, the Georgia Institute of Technology did a study on how effective these robots are going to be in interacting with people. Sounds reasonable. After all, there's no point in blowing an entire R&D budget on Robot Guidance Counselors (that's robots doing the job of guidance counselors, not guidance counselors for robots, by the way) when it turns out that people would rather get life advice from a rolled-up newspaper.

It turns out that robots may have a future in the nursing industry. Grief counselors, not so much. Interestingly enough, subjects responded differently to the exact same robot contact depending on what they thought was happening. People who thought that the robot was cleaning their arm responded much more favorably than people who thought that the robot was trying to "comfort" them.

What does this mean for the sex robots of the future? too early to tell, but there may still be hope for them in certain specialized fetish niches.

(And I demand some recognition for the fact that I made it all the way through this post without changing their "Touched by a Robot" press release title into a "Touched by an Angel" joke!)

Silent Killers: Now with More Silence!

That's right, flying robot killers from the future are going to be more silent than ever before! That's robots who fly and kill people, not flying people who kill robots, by the way.

Georgia Tech is working on making our unmanned aerial drones quieter, so that they will be tougher to spot. Short-term thinking says that's a good idea, because we'll be able to spy on today's enemies more effectively.

In the long term, we're already developing more efficient aerial predators based on the design of prehistoric killing machines. It's bad enough that they'll be harvesting our own organs to hunt us down and kill us more effectively, now they'll be able to do it without giving us any warning.

It's going to be a dark future, indeed.

They Won't Have To Hunt Us

So, we're using robots to help stroke victims regain their mobility.

It makes sense. I wouldn't want to spend my day watching someone do boring, repetitive motions to rebuild their muscle strength. In fact, it's so boring and repetitive that the stroke victims don't like doing it. The breakthrough in this case is that by involving virtual reality environments (read: having patients use the robot as a controller in a video game), stroke victims will work at the rehab exercises longer and regain function faster.

Sure, it sounds helpful at first. Until you think about what's in it for the robots. Not only will we be providing them with massive amounts of valuable data about how we move, where our mobility weaknesses are, and how we can be stopped from moving, but we're also giving them the chance to harm us directly. It's all fun and games physical therapy until the patient has his legs ripped off. We won't need faster robots that hunt us like dogs, we're already walking right into their cold metallic hands!

Slap Wraps as an Evolutionary Imperative

See also: acid-wash jeans, beanie babies, and those goddamn Wii Fits that are cropping up everywhere I look. They're all fads, but now Science offers the reason behind our societal obsession (and later abandonment) of the Latest Big Thing: we evolved that way.

The idea is that 1) We see something (a corporate logo). 2) We start to unconsciously associate that something with a "reward" (the product), but we see it infreqently and assume it is scarce. 3) That's when we work to actively acquire it and make it part of our lives. 4) The logo & product are suddenly everywhere, because everybody has one 4) and our unconscious mind decides that this product isn't worth working for, since it can be found so easily all over the place and decide that it must be worthless (Oh, how I wish my subconscious would skip to the part where it decides that a Wii is worthless!). And that, boys and girls, is the life cycle of a fad.

That's all well and good, but after announcing this theory, those maniacs at Rensselaer decide that marketers should use this information to find new ways of pushing things on us subconsciously. That's like announcing that bears should look into getting stainless steel claws. People, they have enough of an advantage already.

Then again, you shouldn't be suprised at the professor who recommended this. It's the same guy who wants to harvest your eyes for robots.

Cybernetic Tiger Lillies

Are they still cyborgs if they're part machine, part plant? I ask because that's going to be the wave of the future, if our discarded nanotechnology ends up in plants. Now we not only have to worry about robot insurrection, but rhododendron ascension as well.

The University of Delaware has proven that plants can absorb nanoparticles into their tissues. With a little work, they found that pumpkin seeds were able to absorb iron oxide nanoparticles. Naturally, it was a soil physicist who did the study.

The alarm they're raising is that if the nanoparticles can get into plants, then other animals that eat those plants will be passing the particles along the food chain. That's not good news, but neither is the thought of these plants getting hold of advanced nanotechnolgy and using it to become superplants. Then we're screwed.

One Step Closer to Cyborgs

Not that mimetic polymer alloy or whatever that the shape changing T-1000s were made of, but we're getting there. We've now developed organic microscopic wires that assemble themselves in water.

They're called organic because they're derived from carbon-based compounds.

Now, you may ask yourself if this is a good idea. Do we even need microscopic wires that are 10,000 times smaller than human hair? And what's so great about getting them to assemble themselves in water? Well, according to the researchers, it's going to help with medical breakthroughs.

How they're going to help remains to be seen. In fact, the wording of the press release even leaves it vague as to whether these "wires" will actually conduct electricity. Still, I'm sure someone will figure out a way to use them as a stepping stone to world domination.

Tomorrow's Technology Brings You Yesterday's Brutal Dismemberments, Today!

In a well-thought-out marriage of robotics and dinosaurs, paleontologists have been working with aeronautic engineers to create an aerial drone based on the design of a Pterodactyl.

This can only end well. I mean, we have solid proof that dinosaurs were ferocious, brutal, and damn near unstoppable, now we'll have robot dinosaurs stalking us from the skies, using our own eyes to spot us.

Well, probably not my eyes, because I have pretty crappy vision. And really, if you're going to build a flying robot anyway, you might as well use eyes that are better suited for that kind of thing, like from a hawk or an owl. But that's beside the point. Do we really want to make autonomous machines more mobile? Shouldn't we maintain some measure of control?

Or should we go the other way, and make it mandatory that ALL robots mimic some type of animal? What animal would you copy if you were in charge of designing a robot?

Parental Role Reversal and Stress

Newsflash: caring for an older parent when you yourself are a midlife adult is incredibly stressful. I mean, who would have thought that watching the people who rasied you and who were always there for you actually needing assistance themselves could have any kind of negative psychological effects, right?

Anyway, it turns out that adults who care for older parents are under more stress, especially if they're trying to balance that with caring for their own children.

Since our constant medical breakthroughs are keeping people alive longer there are going to be a lot more parents hanging around. I think we need to follow the example set by the Japanese, and develop robots that will help care for our elderly. We'd still visit (the elderly, not the robots) and provide emotional support, but we'll let the robots handle the physical effort.

The Computer Always Wins

The University of California has been working on programs that teach computers how to play poker.

While I am very much in favor of taking all of our most social activities and engineering them so that they can be enjoyed without interacting with any other humans, I think that this is a terrible idea. Why? Robot doom, of course. Do we really want our computers learning how to tell when humans are bluffing? ("There's no one else hiding in this house. I swear, you don't need to hunt down my wife and children, you already killed them!") Worse yet, do we want them learning how they can bluff? ("I LIKE YOU HUMAN, I PROMISE I'LL NEVER HARM YOU.")

In the end, it will probably just be the computers distracting us with poker while they send the hunter/killer squads after us.

Smooth Extraction

Are you at all familiar with NOTES (natural-orifice translumenal endoscopic surgery)? It's when doctors try to remove internal organs without making external incisions. They enter through natural orifices. You heard me. That's exactly where they put the instruments.

Well, maybe not exactly. Doctors at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center have been pulling gallbladders through uteruses (uterii?) for the past year now, and have plans to start surgeries through the mouth or rectum in the future.

Okay, there have only been two surgeries of their type so far. Both gallbladders, both removed through the uterus. The big news about the latest procedure is that before, they had to cut external holes in the patient to see what they were doing. This time, there were no external incisions.

I'd be more enthusiastic about it if I wasn't worried that it was just paving the way for the killer robots to have an easier time plucking out your eyes without any fuss.

Mark Changizi Wants to Harvest Your Eyes for Science

Okay, that was worded a little strongly. Still, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's assistant professor of cognitive science has spent a lot of time thinking about how you look at things.

First, he looked into the way that we're actually seeing the future, based on the way that we have to anticipate things like catching objects or getting out of the way of danger. Our eyes compensate for slight neural delays, allowing us to see what is happening in the present even while the speed of light is showing us things that happened in the (very recent) past.

Now he is trying to use these properties to make human eyes into a type of computer that glances at complex visual stimuli and generates perceptions that have resolved computations. His hopes to use "visual circuits" as a rival to DNA computations seem a little ambitious, though. "The visual logic gates do not always transmit the appropriate perception at the output."

Whatever. Just as long as life doesn't turn into some horror movie where evil robots start using body parts to run their advanced human-killing algorithms.

Robogeddon

Game over, folks. They have invented a robot that can climb walls. We can run, but we can't hide. I hope that they don't get around to inventing SkyNet.